The power of creative vision

"Logos don't really matter," a friend quipped to me out of the blue.

I leaned back in my chair and gave him a quizzical look.

I nodded.

He was right — the truth is logos don't really matter… at least not on their own.

What does matter is creative vision (aka creative direction).

In fact, many of today's most valuable brands and products owe a great deal of their success to it.

Simply put, creative vision is the sum of the whole — a brand's narrative, identity, strategy, positioning, tone of voice, typography, colors, art direction, and, yes… logo.

To illustrate the power of creative vision, let's take an example everyone's familiar with: Steve Jobs and Apple. Without his unrelenting vision for brightness, purity, and the "intuitively obvious," Apple wouldn't have gone on to become the most valuable company in the world.

For a less played out example, consider the recent success of bottled mountain water brand Liquid Death. Conceptualized by former Netflix creative director Mike Cessario, Liquid Death stands out from other bottled water brands through tallboy packaging and punkrock graphic design. Liquid Death was valued at US$525 million as of January 2022.

Clearly, compelling creative vision is nothing less than a superpower. But unfortunately for brands, it's in rare supply.

Why is creative vision so rare?

In an interview with Charlamagne in 2018, Ye said,

"People can write, write, write all they want, but what are people doing? [For] anybody that's out there doing, they know how hard it is to actually 'do.'"

There's a prerequisite to being able to weave creative visions together: you need to be a doer.

You can't sit on the sidelines and commentate. You have to intimately understand the elements of branding, continually experiment and hone your skills with a growing list of creative tools, and be an active consumer of culture.

As you do so, you gain new perspectives — becoming capable of shapeshifting through different disciplines and viewpoints.

What all of this ultimately contributes to is your ability to tell human truths, the basis for any good creative work. You can be as flashy and baffling as you want with your social ads and marketing collateral, but without conveying a human truth, your work will be incapable of moving someone. After all, there's almost nothing we want more than truth.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote,

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board."

Creative vision isn't scarce because there's any shortage of opinions on colorways, fonts, and art styles, but because few people have the courage to do what it takes to uncover — and communicate — the truth.

Don't shy from the truth

In effect, compelling creative visions instantiate abstract worlds where the human mind can explore ideas and discover new truths.

Maybe it's the idea that with innovative, human-friendly tools, anyone can harness the full potential of their curiosity, creativity, and fitness (Apple). Or maybe it's the idea that there's nothing more counterculture/cool than staying hydrated and reducing plastic pollution (Liquid Death).

Creative vision is a purveyor of truth, and as such, has the power to define how novel and valuable a product is. As Dentsu International executives Wendy Clark and Frank Levron said, "modern creativity is an important economic multiplier for clients and brands." If you forego it and focus solely on product development (as many companies do), you'll be putting a ceiling on your brand's growth potential.

We're all searching for the truth. Sometimes, all it takes is a little push to realize it.